Lauren Oliver

“Would you like to?” he says. His voice is hardly audible above the wind—so low it’s barely a whisper.“Would I like to what?” My heart is roaring, rushing in my ears, and thoughthere are still several inches between his hand and mine, there’s a zipping,humming energy that connects us, and from the heat flooding my body youwould think we were pressed together, palm to palm, face to face.“Dance,” he says, at the same time closing those last few inches and findingmy hand and pulling me closer, and at that second the song hits a high note and Iconfuse the two impressions, of his hand and the soaring, the lifting of the music.We dance.”

“For a second we just stand there in silence. Then, suddenly, Alex is back,easy and smiling again. “I left a note for you one time. In the Governor’s fist, youknow?”I left a note for you one time. It’s impossible, too crazy to think about, and Ihear myself repeating, “You left a note for me?”“I’m pretty sure it said something stupid. Just hi, and a smiley face, and myname. But then you stopped coming.” He shrugs. “It’s probably still there. Thenote, I mean. Probably just a bit of paper pulp by now.”

“I’m Hana,” Hana says. “And this is Lena.” She jabs me with an elbow. Iknow I must look like a fish, standing there with my mouth gaping open, but I’mtoo outraged to speak. He’s lying. I know he’s the one I saw yesterday, would betmy life on it.“Alex. Nice to meet you.” Alex keeps his eyes on me as he and Hana shakehands. Then he extends a hand to me. “Lena,” he says thoughtfully. “I’ve neverheard that name before.”

“I still wanted to know why. As though somebody was going to answer that for me, as though any answer would be satisfying.”

“I feel an ache in my throat, but I manage to smile. Two conflicting desires go through me at the same time, each as sharp as a razorblade: I want to see you grow up and Don't ever change.”

“Of all the miracles Po had seen in the time and space of its death, Po thought this--the absorption of another, the carrying of it--was the most bewildering and remarkable of all. Whenever Bundle separated again, Po was left with an ache of sadness that reminded the ghost of the body it had left behind.”

“Everything in me feels fluttering and free, like I could take off from the ground at any second. Music, I think, he makes me feel like music.”

“And when I wake up it's wonderful, like I've been carried quietly onto a calm, peaceful shore, and the dream, and its meaning, has broken over me like a wave and is ebbing away now, leaving me with a single, solid certainty. I know now.”

“My heart shoots into my throat every time I think I see his loping walk, or catch sight of some floppy brown hair on a boy - but it's never him, and each time it isn't, my heart does a reverse trajectory down into the very pit of my stomach.”

“Somewhere in the endless spinning of eternity that one, tiny, fraction of a second where our lips met is lost forever.”

“And then, just at that moment, when I'm no longer sure if I'm dreaming or awake or walking some valley in between where everything you wish for comes true, I feel the flutter of his lips on mine.”

“I'm feeling anxious about tonight - half dread and half excitement - like when you hear thunder and know that any second you'll see lightning tearing across the sky, nipping at the clouds with its teeth.”

“Nothing exists but him.”

“(I)f you do not believe that hearts can bloom suddenly bigger, and that love can open like a flower out of even the hardest places, then I am afraid that for you the road will be long and brown and barren, and you will have trouble finding the light. But if you do believe, then you already know all about magic.”

“She liked the word ineffable because it meant a feeling so big or vast that it could not be expressed in words.And yet, because it could not be expressed in words, people had invented a word to express it, and that made Liesl feel hopeful, somehow.”

“Step on a crack , you'll break your mama's back.Step on a stone, you'll end up all alone.Step on a stick, you're bound to get the Sick.Watch where you tread, you'll bring out all the dead. - A common children's playground chant, usually accompanied by jumping rope or clapping.”

“Find the things that matter, and hold on to them, and fight for them, and refuse to let them go.”

“Hunky Heroes, rescuing distressed women, captive princesses, and girls without wheels since 1684. p. 450”

“There is only what you want and what happens. There is only grabbing on and holding tight in the darkness.”

“And for a moment―for a split second―everything else falls away, the whole pattern and order of my life, and a huge joy crests in my chest. I am no one, and I owe nothing to anybody, and my life is my own.”

“We are such small, stupid things. For most of my life I thought of nature as the stupid thing: Blind, animal, destructive. We, the humans, were clean and smart and in control: we had wrestled the rest of the world into submission, battered it down, pinned it to a glass slide and the pages of The Bool of Shhh.”

“I'm mesmerized by the way his fingers move confidently along her skin, as though her body is his to reat and touch and tend to. She was mine before she was yours: The words are there, unexpectedly, surging from my throat to my tongue. I swallow them back.”

“All this time, I thought we were growing apart because I was leaving Lena behind. But really it was the reverse. She was learning to lie.She was learning to love.”

“For the first time in a long time, I actually look at her. I've always thought Lena was pretty, but now it occurs to me that at some point - last summer? last year? - she became beautiful.”

“Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums.”

“As Steve draws me closer to the band, all I can see is a frenzied mass of seething, writhing people, like a many-headed sea snake, grinding, waving their arms, stamping their feet, jumping. No rules, just energy - so much energy, you could harness it; I bet you could power Portland for a decade. It is more than a wave. It's a tide, an ocean of bodies.”

“This is one of my favorite things about the Underground: the crashing of the cymbals, the screeching guitar riffs, music that moves into the blood and makes you feel hot and wild and alive.”

“My first kiss. A new kind of kiss, like the new kind of music still playing, softly, in the distance - wild and arrhythmic, desperate. Passionate.”

“That is the strangest thing about the world: how it looks so different from every point of view.”

“But this is my voice. How would you be able to tell when I was talking?”

“Love, it kills you, both when you have it and when you don't.”

“...and once at Hana's house, when we stole some blackberry liqueur from her parents' liquor cabinet and drank until the ceiling started spinning overhead. Hana was laughing and giggling, but I didn't like it, didn't like the sweet sick taste in my mouth or the way my thoughts seemed to break apart like a mist in the sun.”

“It affects your mind so that you cannot think clearly, or make rational decisions about your own well-being.”

“....love and desire enjoy a symbiotic relationship, meaning that one cannot exist without the other. Desire is an enemy to contentment; desire is illness, a feverish brain. Who can be considered healthy who wants? The very word want suggests a lack, an impoverishment, and that is what desire is: an impoverishment of the brain, a flaw, a mistake.”

“Like I've been sketched by an amateur artist: if you don't look too closely, it's all right, but start focusing and all the smudges and mistakes become really obvious.”

“Less than a month ago all of August still stretched before us - long and golden and reassuring, like an endless period of delicious sleep.”

“Kent?" I say, and my voice seems to have to rise from inside the fog, taking forever to get from my brain to my mouth."Yeah?""Promise you'll stay here with me?" I say."I promise," he whispers.”

“And then we're kissing. His lips are soft and leave mine tingling. I close my eyes, and in the darkness behind them I see beautiful blooming things, flowers spinning like snowflakes, and hummingbirds beating the same rhythm as my heart. I'm gone, lost, floating away into nothingness like I am in my dream, but this time it's a good feeling - like soaring, like being totally free. His other hand pushes my hair from my face, and I can feel the impression of his fingers everywhere that they touch, and I think of stars streaking through the sky and leaving burning trails behind them, and in that moment - however long it lasts, seconds, minutes, days - while he's saying my name into my mouth and I"m breathing into him, I realize this, right here, is the first and only time I've ever been kissed.”

“I'm not scared, if that's what you're wondering. The moment of death is full of sound and warmth and light shooting away, arcing up and up and up, and if singing were a feeling it would be this, this light, this lifting, like laughing...The rest you have to find out for yourself.”

“He draws a slow circle in the dirt with his toe, the first physical sign of discomfort or distraction he has given since we arrived. In that moment I am in awe of him: Since I've known him he has done nothing but support me and give me comfort and listen to me, and all this time he has been carrying the weight of his own secrets too.”

“In my head I try and reach back, through the fence, past the smoke; I try and grab his hand and pull. Alex, come back.There is nothing to do but sink. The hours close around me, encase me completely, like a tomb.”

“Sometimes I'm afraid to go to sleep because of what I'm leaving behind.”

“A good friend keeps your secrets for you. A best friend helps you keep your own secrets.”

“I love you. Remember. They cannot take it”

“I'm not with Rob," I say quickly. "Not anymore." "You're not?" He's staring at me so intensely I can see the stripes of gold alternating with the green in his eyes like spokes of a wheel.I shake my head."That's a good thing." He's still staring at me like that, like he's the first and last person who will ever stare at me."Because..." His voice trails off, and his eyes travel slowly down to my lips, and there's so much heat roaring throughmy body I swear I'm going to pass out."Because?" I prompt him, surprised I can still speak."Because I'm sorry, but I can't help it, and I really need to kiss you right now.”

“i feel like a curtain has dropped away and i'm seeing people for who they really are, different, and sharp, and unknowable.”

“i think of all the thousands of billions of steps and missteps and chances and coincidences that have brought me here. Brought you here, and it feels like the biggest miracle in the world.”

“I shiver, thinking how easy it is to be totally wrong about people-to see one tiny part of them and confuse it for the whole, to see the cause and think it's the effect or vice versa”

“I wonder idly how long i can go without sleep before I flip my shit and start running down the street in my underwear, hallicinating purple spiders.”

“Popularity's a weird thing. You can't really define it, and it's not cool to talk about, but you know it when you see it. Like a lazy eye, or porn.”